You've Experimented with Clay. Here's What Comes Next.

If your team has spent time with Clay, you already know how powerful it is. You can pull data from dozens of sources, build enrichment workflows without writing code, and add real depth to your contact records in ways that were not possible a few years ago.

We use Clay at GoodWork. We are not here to argue against it. We are here to talk about what comes after it.

Because here is what we hear consistently from marketing and RevOps leaders who have done the enrichment work: the data is better than it has ever been, and they still cannot answer the question that actually matters. Does our customer data actually tell us where to invest, what to prioritize, and what needs to change?

That is not a failure of enrichment. That is a different problem entirely. And it is the problem that led me to build GoodWork.

What Clay Does Well

It is worth being specific about this, because the distinction matters.

Clay gives teams access to rich, structured data from dozens of sources. LinkedIn profiles, company funding, technographic signals, hiring trends, social presence. It lets you orchestrate complex enrichment workflows visually, without needing an engineer. It democratized a capability that used to require dedicated data teams to build and maintain.

For companies that previously had sparse CRM records with a name, title, email, and not much else, Clay is transformative. Suddenly your contact records have depth. You can see company size, funding stage, tech stack, growth signals. That is a meaningful upgrade in the quality of information available to your sales and marketing teams.

The teams that get the most out of Clay tend to be operationally sophisticated. They understand data. They think in workflows. They are the kind of people who build systems rather than just use them.

And that sophistication is exactly what leads them to the next question.

The Question Clay Was Never Designed to Answer

Once your records are enriched, a natural question follows: now what?

You have thousands of contacts with 30+ fields on each one. But which ones actually matter to your business? Not in the abstract "this person has a senior title at a funded company" sense. In the specific "this contact matches the pattern of buyers who convert and expand for us" sense.

That question requires something enrichment does not provide. It requires modeling your actual customer base to understand who buys, who expands, and who churns. It requires identifying the specific patterns and characteristics that distinguish your best customers from everyone else. And it requires scoring every contact in your database against those patterns, continuously, as data changes.

One CMO put it to me this way last quarter: "We enriched our entire database. When I asked my team who we should prioritize, they sorted by company size and job title. That is filtering, not segmentation."

She was right. And it was not her team's fault. They had excellent data. They did not have the layer that turns data into strategic direction. Enrichment answers "who is this person?" Intelligence answers "does this person matter to us, and what should we do about it?"

Those are fundamentally different questions, and they require fundamentally different systems to answer.

Where Most Teams Get Stuck

The natural instinct is to try to build that intelligence layer yourself. Your team is smart. You already built Clay workflows. Why not go further?

Some teams do, and a few pull it off. But most hit the same set of walls.

The first is maintenance. Clay workflows are powerful, but they need ongoing attention. Data sources change, APIs update, match rates fluctuate, edge cases accumulate. Someone on your team becomes the Clay administrator, spending real hours every week keeping things running. That is time they are not spending on strategy, campaigns, or pipeline.

The second is integration. Getting enriched data from Clay into your CRM in a way that is clean, deduplicated, and usable by the rest of the team is a project in itself. Contact and account creation logic, deduplication, field mapping, making sure you do not overwrite existing records. It is solvable, but it takes more work than most teams anticipate.

The third, and this is the real one, is the analytical leap from enriched records to strategic segmentation. Even with perfect data and clean CRM integration, you still need to model your customers against actual outcomes. Which segments drive disproportionate revenue? Where does churn concentrate? What combination of characteristics predicts expansion? Maintaining that analysis as your data changes is not a one-time project. It is a continuous capability.

Most teams discover that bridging enrichment to intelligence requires a different kind of investment than they expected. Not because Clay let them down, but because the problem above the data layer is genuinely hard.

What GoodWork Adds

GoodWork sits on top of Clay and dozens of other data sources. We handle the enrichment, the integration, the CRM operations, and the intelligence layer. Your team does not manage workflows, maintain integrations, or build segmentation models. They use the output.

Here is what that looks like in practice.

Customer modeling. GoodWork connects to your Salesforce or HubSpot and analyzes your existing customer base. Who buys, who expands, who churns. What patterns predict each outcome. What your best customers share that your worst ones do not. Within about 30 days, you get a segmentation analysis that defines your buyer segments, quantifies which ones drive disproportionate value, and provides clear recommendations on where to invest, maintain, or fix. Your full customer base comes back processed, every contact scored, segmented, and tagged. All delivered into your CRM.

Your team's time: about 5 to 10 hours. GoodWork does the rest.

Continuous segmentation. From that point forward, every new lead that enters your CRM gets enriched, segmented, and scored automatically. Inbound leads get routed based on fit and segment. Event and tradeshow lists can be uploaded and prioritized instantly. Existing customers who match the profile of your multi-product buyers get surfaced for cross-sell. Former buyers who changed companies get flagged. Data stays fresh through continuous enrichment and deduplication.

Nobody on your team maintains this. It runs.

Quarterly realignment. Strategy is not static. Markets shift, products evolve, segments perform differently than expected. GoodWork delivers quarterly reviews that analyze performance, recommend adjustments, and recalibrate the system. Led by a dedicated strategist who knows your business.

What Changes for Your Team

The teams that make this shift describe the same set of changes.

Sales gets leads with real context. Not just enriched fields, but fit scores, segment classifications, and specific reasons why a contact is worth their time. They stop cherry-picking from broad lists and start working a focused set of high-fit contacts with confidence.

Marketing builds campaigns around actual segments. Instead of blasting the same message to everyone, they can speak to what each segment cares about. The performance difference between generic outreach and segment-specific messaging is significant and immediate.

Customer success sees which accounts match expansion patterns. Cross-sell is no longer a guessing game. They know which customers look like multi-product buyers and which ones are showing early churn signals.

Leadership gets a view of customer composition and segment performance they can take to the board. Resource allocation decisions are backed by data, not assumptions.

And the person who was spending 15 hours a week maintaining Clay workflows? They get that time back and the intelligence coming out of the system is better than what they were producing manually, because it is modeled against actual customer outcomes and updated continuously.

Building On What You Have Already Built

If your team has invested in Clay, you have already done the hard part of recognizing that better data matters. That puts you ahead of most companies who are still operating with sparse, stale CRM records.

The next step is not more enrichment. It is the layer that turns enrichment into something your team can act on every day. Customer modeling that tells you which segments actually drive your business. Scoring that tells your team who matters and why. Intelligence that lives in your CRM and stays current without anyone maintaining it.

All the data you were getting from Clay, plus the strategic layer that makes it actionable. That is what GoodWork delivers.

- Tom at GoodWork

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Tom Zampini is a NYC-based entrepreneur, operator, and repeat founder with a track record of building and scaling technology startups. He grew i2Systems from a college startup into a leader in intelligent LED technology, founded Beco, a data analytics platform for physical spaces, and guided it through acquisition. He later served as Chief Product Officer at Convene, where he helped transform the company into a tech-first, capital-efficient operator. Tom is now the Founder and CEO of GoodWork, an AI-native platform that turns CRM complexity into go-to-market intelligence. Follow on LinkedIn.

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